Saturday, July 20, 2013

Five Minute Creations

Making stuff- is there anything more fulfilling? I like working on the fly with not much planning and lots of improvisation. There's something thrilling about making it all work from the contents of an old junk basket and a glue gun.

Alex peeled a water bottle label off and stuck it around his wrist, then got excited, talking about how he wanted to make "stuff" to go on it, stuff he could use, like wires and buttons and screens. Dude dreams big, and so after telling him how cool I thought that was, I carefully mentioned that although we could do something like that, the wires and buttons and screens wouldn't actually, yknow, be a functional high tech device. He grinned and rolled his eyes at me (ach! time, you speedy bitch, where did my babies go?) and told me that it would just be an awesome toy for imaginary games. Rad. Although where was that perspective when he was 2.5 and I built him a little car out of balsa wood and wheels and he rended his clothes in fury at the lack of a tiny perfect engine? Whatever, this new development is all good, I won't question it anymore. Dude wants to Make Stuff, and I love it!

So we made these:

Scraps of felt (leftover from Halloween costumes), mini-LEDs and coin batteries (leftover from the wedding), a couple of glass beads, all glued together. And now we have Power Wristbands! Five minutes of making, five minutes of talking about electrical circuits while I glued, and endless exploration of the big beautiful world. Hell yeah!